“No, it isn’t,” she says with a sister’s sharp wit. “You think that she is going to forgive you without you apologizing. You think that you are going to win where John Dudley failed. You think that you are going to proclaim your faith and everyone is going to admire you for it, just like Roger Ascham, the tutor, does, and that ridiculous man in Switzerland.”

She catches me on the raw. I am furious at the insult to my spiritual teacher Henry Bullinger. “You’re jealous!” I spit at her. “You name great men, but you have never understood their teaching.”

“Jealous of what?” She raises her voice. “Of this?” Her gesture takes in the low-ceilinged interconnecting rooms, the view over the enclosed gardens, the Tower walls beyond them. “You’re in prison, condemned to death, your husband a prisoner condemned to death. There is nothing here that I would be jealous of! I want to live. I want to be married and have children. I want to wear beautiful gowns and dance! I want life. And I know you do, too. Nobody could want to die for their faith at sixteen. In England! When it is your own cousin on the throne? She will forgive you! She has forgiven Father. Just ask her forgiveness and come home to Bradgate and let us be happy! Think of your bedroom there, of your books. Think of the river path where we ride!”

I turn from her as if she were tempting me. It is easier if I think of her as a worldly temptation, a little gargoyle-faced thing, not my pretty blond sister with her simple appetites and her foolish hopes. “No,” I say. “For whosoever will save his life, shall lose it: but whoso loseth his life for My sake shall find it.”

I hear her little whimper as she faces the door and raps on it to be released. She has not been taught to argue as I have been taught from babyhood; she has education but no scholarship. It is very unlikely that she could ever persuade me of anything, my silly little sister. But I am moved by her tears. I would comfort her if I could, but I am called. I don’t turn to her but I remind her: “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother-in-law.”

“Mother,” she says, muffled from behind her sleeve. She is mopping her streaming tears.

I am so surprised that I take her by the shoulder and turn her round to face me. “What?”